Monday, April 29, 2013

[Note: I've added a response to Paul Heideman's critique at the bottom.]

When Jacobin published Vivek
Chibber’s “Marxist” polemic against postcolonial theory, I wanted to write
a counter-polemic. In fact, I did. As both a Marxist and a postcolonialist, I
felt like Chibber was forcing me to choose sides where sides did not need to be
chosen. After all, Chibber has to make several logical leaps in order to land
his criticism of postcolonial theory; in a very real way, he has to invent it. The most obvious problem with
Chibber’s argument is the representativeness he ascribes to the South Asian
Subaltern Studies collective—for Chibber, they epitomize postcolonial theory in
all its anti-Marxist glory. The second most obvious problem with Chibber’s
argument is his refusal to count as constitutive of postcolonial theory all
anticolonial Marxist thinkers whose work was foundational for, or retroactively
incorporated into, the postcolonial canon: George Padmore, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R.
James, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, Walter Rodney…Chibber
is not unaware of this tradition. Indeed, in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital he recounts Robert
Young’s lengthy
attempt to place this Marxist tradition at the center of postcolonial
theory, but only to discount it as “spectacularly mistaken.” Young is mistaken
because “Subaltern Studies and, by extension, postcolonial theory are either in
tension with or simply reject” what Chibber calls “anticolonial socialism”
(290). In other words, after having presented a robust Marxist genealogy of
postcolonial theory, Chibber rejects it because Subaltern Studies is postcolonial theory, Subaltern
Studies is anti-Marxist, and
therefore postcolonial theory cannotbe Marxist. So, Chibber approaches his
object with set terms that in fact constitute his object, and constitute it in
such a way that Marxism is always exterior to it. This gets us to the biggest,
but perhaps least obvious, problem with Chibber’s Marxist assault on (what he
calls) postcolonial theory: he does not approach this body of knowledge in a
fulsomely Marxist fashion. Indeed, it’s unclear to me if Chibber, despite his
vituperative polemic against anti-Marxist postcolonial studies, could in fact
be described as a Marxist at all. At the level of method, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital is one of the least
dialectical, most flatfooted “Marxist” texts that I’ve read in some time.

Chibber’s “Marxist”
criticism of postcolonial theory is that postcolonial theory is not Marxism.
And, to be clear, it is a criticism, not a critique. Critique maintains an
intimate relationship with the object it works over: it inhabits the object’s
terms, takes them as far as they can go, and in so doing recovers the
potentials immanent to a field of thought even as it highlights the boundedness
of that field. Critique becomes so intimate to its object that the critic risks
being identified with it. Just think of Marx: he so affirmatively embraces
political economy in his Kritik der
politischen Ökonomie that it is often assumed that Kapital is a political economy, that Marx is a political economist.
No one, however, is going to mistake Chibber for a postcolonialist. This is not
to say that Chibber does not cite postcolonial theoretical texts voluminously;
he does. 85% of his citations are from three books. But he unpacks the arguments
of three subalternists simply to show that a) they misread Marxism and b) they
misunderstand capitalism and c) through their miscomprehension of Marx and
capitalism they have come to articulate an anti-Marxist theory, one that
mystifies capitalist dynamics and reinscribes Orientalist claims about the
difference of what Chibber is still somehow comfortable calling, without irony,
“the East.” So, Chibber departs from a crucial aspect of Marxist
epistemological and rhetorical protocol—critique—in order to defend Marxism. His
very procedure assumes that Marxism exists in a position of exteriority to
postcolonial theory. Indeed, it assumes that Marxism exists as a stable and
coherent set of epistemological and political positions, positions that can be
transformed into propositions that establish the non-identify of Marxism and
postcolonial studies. So, postcolonial theory isn’t Marxist, fine—but what is
Marxism for Chibber?

It’s kind of hard to say.
Chibber does not expend anything like the same amount of time unpacking—much
less justifying—his own Marxist normative and epistemological presuppositions
as he does in showing that Guha, Chatterjee, and Chakrabarty are anti-Marxist. In
broad outlines, Chibber’s Marxism depends on “a defense of two universalisms, one pertaining to capital and the other to
labor.” More specifically, Chibber’s Marxism is bound to the idea that ”the
modern epoch is driven by the twin forces of, on the one side, capital’s
unrelenting drive to expand, to conquer new markets, and to impose its
domination on the laboring classes [the first universalism], and, on the other
side, the unceasing struggle by these classes to defend themselves, their
well-being, against this onslaught [the second universalism] (208).” So far,
nothing objectionable: welcome to the Communist
Manifesto. The problem emerges, however, when Chibber attempts moving from
the universal to the particular, from the universality of capitalism’s
antagonism to the particular social zoning of its enactment. If postcolonial
theorists want to hold onto the particularity of the particular, and engage the
universal through it, Chibber uses these “two universalisms” to denude the particular,
to remove the peculiarity of the particular in order to reduce it to the
universal. Methodologically, Chibber’s Marxism is pre-Hegelian. Indeed, his
Marxism is the kind of “monochrome formalism” derided by Hegel, an epistemology
for which the universal dominates the particular, one through which “the living
essence of the matter [is] stripped away or boxed up dead.”

The entirety of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of
Capital is staged as an antagonism between the champions of particularism
(the Subaltern Studies people) and the champions of universalism (Marxists).
Minus the first three or so, each of Chibber’s chapters has the same form: the
first section unpacks a subalternist’s methodological valorization of some form
of particularity (Indian nationalism, peasant consciousness, Chakrabarty’s
“History 2”) and the second section asserts a universalist counter-thesis, one
that shows how the phenomena treated by the featured subalternist can actually
become legible and explicable according to one of the two universalisms Chibber
embraces. In other words, the chapters do not stage a dialectical tension between
the particular and the universal. Rather, the chapters place particularist and
universalist accounts side by side in a lifeless unity; indeed, the chapters
keep the particular and the universal apart, positing an antinomic relation
between them. The superior explanatory power of universalist accounts is not
derived or deduced but asserted.

But Marxism is not a flatfootedly universalist
epistemology. No theory indebted to a dialectical philosophy could be. In order
to transform the relationship between the particular and the universal into an
antinomic allergy, in order to assert the superior explanatory and political
value of a universalist analytic, Chibber first needs to contort Marxism into
something it never was. I’m now going to work through both of Chibber’s
“universalisms,” reading them alongside moments in Marxist theory. It’s going
to get kind of techy, so, if Marxian scholasticism isn’t your jam, feel free to
skip down or click away.

The Universalism of Capital

Consider Chibber’s discussion
of the “universalization of capital.” Chibber accuses the subalternists of
arguing that “capital abandoned its ‘universalizing mission’” in the colonial
world, a putative abandonment that has theoretical/historiographical effects. For
Chibber, subalternists use the claim that colonial capitalism abandoned its
universalizing mission as a means to assert that theories of capital that
presuppose capital’s universality are not applicable to the colonial world.
(It’s always, for Chibber, a question of application, of imposing abstract,
superordinate terms onto the ordinary worlds of the particular.)Chibber’s response is that, well, capitalism did continue its universalizing mission.
But what does Chibber even mean by capital’s universalization? Simply put, its
globalization, its “forc[ing] producers to submit to the competitive pressures
of the market” (138). He continues, “This drive to continually intensify
surplus extraction and continually lower production costs is what is
‘universalized’ in capitalism.” Capitalism thus produces “abstract labor,”
which Chibber rightly notes is not “homogenous labor” but is rather a social
fiction produced by the market: “the emergence of abstract labor is specific to
capitalism because [it] creates a social mechanism that takes the dispersed,
disparate laboring activities of producers, and forces them onto a common
metric” (140). Chibber is making a crucial point: the universalization of
capital involves the implantation of particular mechanisms of distribution (the
market) and the formation of a
quotidian social epistemology derived from the market (abstract labor). The one
implies the other.

But is this so? According to
Marx, the simple articulation of a society to a capitalist market does not immediately yield “abstract
labor” as its social precipitate. In what is now the appendix to volume 1 of Capital, Marx distinguishes between the
“formal” and the “real” subsumption of societies into capital. In conditions of
formal subsumption, “capital subsumes the labor process as it finds it, that is
to say, it takes over an existing labor
process, developed by different and more archaic modes of production”
(1021). In conditions of real subsumption, capital backforms the labor process,
taking over it directly. Formally subsumed societies produce capital for
capital, but capital has not reconstituted the entirety of the social. Rather,
capital gloms onto given forms of production and simply extracts surplus:
formally subsumed societies produce absolute surplus value, not relative surplus
value. Chibber is aware of this distinction, sort of; he marks the fact that in
the formally-subsumed “colonial world, “the reliance on producing absolute
surplus” made capitalism “highly coercive and violent,” whereas “in the
advanced world” [sic] the dominance of “relative surplus value caused a switch
to less personalized” and less violent modes of value creation and extraction
(113). Aware that capitalism maintains and (re)produces forms of production it
finds to hand, Chibber critiques the subalternists for refusing to realize that
capitalism does just that, suggesting that their anti-Marxism derives from
their assumption that capitalism only takes the form it takes in societies
where relative surplus production reigns. But
he refuses to mark the gap between societies producing absolute and societies
producing relative surplus value as indexical of a fissure between formal and
real subsumption.

This is key, insofar as
Marx’s theorization of this gap shows that capital a) doesn’t universalize whole
hog, all at once and that b) the quotidian social epistemology called “abstract
labor” that the market disseminates is a territorialized phenomenon. Indeed,
Marx describes at length in volume 3 of Capital
how certain modes of bookkeeping only become available within conditions of
real subsumption. In my own research on plantation accountancy, I’ve uncovered
a bunch of planters who desperately want
to be capitalist, but can’t be: the market’s uneven territorialization and
subsumption of the globe inhibits some tryhard capitalists from adopting the
“common metric” of abstract labor. Even as capital globalizes, it auto-delimits
its universality (cf. all of world systems theory). It is not mystification to
suggest that “abstract labor” is an improper analytic for the relation between
capital and laborers in a given zone of the world-system when the abstraction
of those diverse labors into calculable values takes place beyond the boundary
of an epistemic divide. For most plantations or farms producing colonial exports,
abstraction was a retroaction, a fact that inhibited capital accounting,
prevented the optimal disposal of variable capital, and led to crazy crises of
overproduction. Abstraction happened in another time and place—in London or
Glasgow, say, months after the produce had been harvested and shipped—and
colonial capitalists could only reckon with their production through
abstraction months after their produce had been monetized and realized on the
market. The one thing most colonial capitalists knew is that they could not operate like the ideal-typical
“firm” that undergirds Chibber’s analysis. To suggest, as Chibber does, that the
universalization of capital consists simply in a “drive” to “intensify surplus
extraction” reduces the material differentiation between forms of surplus
extraction to a contingent accident, and thus discounts the way in which the
capacity of this “drive” to realize itself is preformed by structural-material
conditions. Instead of a Marxian account, in other words, we get a Weberian
one.

If capital universalizes,
this universalization is an uneven tendency,
not an accomplished fact. This point has extremely important practical and
theoretical effects. On one hand, as suggested, it means that capitalist
rationality materially transforms depending on a society’s mode of articulation
to capital. The globalization of capital implies not its universalization but
its striation—this is a Marxist, and indeed Marx’s, thesis. On the other hand,
this striation of capital’s globality impacts the labor process, labor’s
relation to capital, and the modes through which resistance can take place. Formally
subsumed societies contain a great deal of socialities that are defective for
capitalism. Their modes of resistance are not reducible to capital and, indeed,
what the underclasses of such societies resist is not necessarily structurally
or phenomenologically identical to it. As Marx recognized as early as the Grundrisse (in his brief discussion of
post-emancipation Jamaica) and as late as his writings on Russian peasant
communities, these forms-of-life can be seized by underclasses and potentiated
as sites of resistance to capital. But this is already pointing us in the
direction of a critique of Chibber’s second universalism, that of labor.

The Universalism of Labor

Chibber’s most useful,
genuinely Marxist claim is that emergent bourgeoisies have no interest in
extending or disseminating democratic freedoms to working classes. The
extension of “bourgeois rights” is not the act of a revolutionary bourgeoisie;
there is, in fact, no such thing as a revolutionary bourgeoisie. Rather, as
Chibber discusses in his overview of the historiography of the English and
French Revolutions, working classes pushed the revolution into directions it
would not go, producing and seizing the bourgeois freedoms that Whiggish
histories wish to see as a gift bestowed by antifeudal capitalists. (This was,
of course, CLR James’ take on the Haitian Revolution in The Black Jacobins, a text and an historical example that Chibber
does not—and cannot—cite.) According to Chibber, the subalternists misrecognize
the ordinary relation of capitalism to the political (i.e., capitalism’s desire
to restrict the zone of state rights and freedoms to the few) and so consider
the dynamics of Indian postcoloniality (where a condition of dominance without
hegemony, or capitalism without an extension of rights, reigns) to be a
refutation of the general dynamics posited by Marxist theory. More importantly,
by pegging the extension of rights and freedoms to an emergent bourgeoisie, the
subalternists’ analytic gaze fixates on that bourgeoisie, on its successes and
failures, and ignores the self-activity of the subaltern classes. Most
importantly, by pegging capitalism to a regime of rights and by asserting that
Indian capitalists failed to extend these rights to subalterns, the
subalternists were able to posit the existence of a separation between the
idioms of bourgeois politics (with its investment in rights, freedoms, and
interests) and that of subaltern politics. According to Chibber, subalternists
mobilized this separation “not…simply to urge us to recognize and respect the
political content of insurgencies” but also to call for “a displacement of the
foundational concepts for political analyses” (157). The subalternists, in
other words, stick too close to the particularist “content” of subaltern
politics and, in so doing, attempt to complicate (or displace, for Chibber) the
universalist “concepts” proposed by “Western theories” of politics (157).

Once again, then, Chibber’s
criticism functions by demoting a particularist content to the status of a
contingent accident and by reasserting the explanatory power of a formal,
universalist concept. Chibber is indeed allergic to thinking from the particular,
resistant to the kind of close hermeneutic engagement it necessitates. (This
allergy to close reading bleeds into his own reading practice of the
subalternists. In a block quote of Chatterjee on 158, he gives a snarky “[sic]” after encountering a “There” in
the text, as if Chatterjee should have written “Their.” The anaphor of the term
in question is “the consciousness of a rebellious peasantry,” a term in the
singular that is marking out an analytic space and thus, in fact, to be
referenced with “There.” A will to criticize makes one a bad reader indeed…) To
the particularist, hermeneutically sensitive accounts of collective peasant
consciousness offered by Chatterjee, or factory worker consciousness offered by
Chakrabarty, Chibber opposes “the idea, central to the Enlightenment tradition”
of interests, of “common interests” that are superordinate to the particularist
contents through which they are worked out. He will also call them “universal
interests.” Let’s ignore the fact that, at least since Spinoza, the common has
been distinguished from the universal. Let’s look instead at the polemical work
to which these universal/common interests are put.

Chibber first asserts the
importance of these universal interests through his criticism of Chatterjee’s
work on peasant consciousness. According to Chibber, Chatterjee valorizes the
collective, communal consciousness of peasants, for whom “community” attains a
“foundational status in peasant psychology” (157). “[I]n cases of peasant
action,” Chibber glosses, “interests are replaced by duty and obligation”; the
“sovereign individual” of “Western theories” are replaced by the “community”
(160). For Chibber, this assertion simply reinscribes, in Orientalist fashion,
the essentialist difference posited between (again) “East” and “West”: “The
West is the site of the bounded individual, while the East is the repository of
Community” (161). Chibber’s solution is to deny the possibility of any form of
difference and simply assert the universal reign of the “bounded individual,”
one who struggles to realize his best interests. Let the pope remain, as Marx
might say, but make everybody pope. Chibber then reveals that all peasant
political activity can be deduced through individual peasant interests.

A Marxist will have three
problems with Chibber’s claims. First, Chibber for some reason simply assumes
and asserts that Marxism is an
Enlightenment philosophy—a claim which sits oddly beside, say, “On the Jewish
Question” or Notebook M of the Grundrisse.
Marxism is a critique of the
Enlightenment: it moves through it to open it up in new ways, ways that point
beyond it. Second, Chibber for some reason thinks that Marxism offers a
transhistorical, transgeographic analytic of the political premised on
individual’s interests, entirely ignoring Marx’s fulminations against the
“Robinsonade” of Enlightenment philosophy. There is, really truly, no theory of
individual action derivable from Marx’s texts. He was a Ricardian, not a
marginalist; a critic of the Enlightenment’s sovereign individual, not its
culminating thinker. The interests that Marx discusses are always class
interests. Third, Chibber wants to collapse the distinction between individual
as unit of analysis and individual as one person, body, and interest. It’s only
in this way that he can read Chatterjee as if the latter claims that all
peasants are stupid and blind to their interests. But even if we think that
“interest” is a meaningful analytic through which to come to grips with peasant
rebellion, it is by no means clear that the individual who has actionable
interests is identical to a single human being. Chayanovian approaches to
peasant economies have long suggested that the household is the proper
individual of the economic world of peasants, and thus the proper unit of
economic analysis for peasant economies. This isn’t to deny that the individual
human beings composing this household do not have dreams, ideas, desires, and
something that might be legible as interests to us; it is to claim that such
dreams, desires, and interests become thinkable and actionable through the
material, econonomic, and political unit of the household.

Chibber wants to get rid of
this complexity and reduce the individual unit of analysis to an embodied
individual so as to reduce political interest to “need,” to “physical
well-being” (202). Everyone you know has a body, after all. Ergo, it is the
universal fundament of political interest; indeed, politics begins through an
assault on the body, when capitalist “domination generates palpable harm to
workers’ physical integrity” (203). Chibber then defines physical well-being as
freedom from “dangerous working conditions, poverty-level wages, high
mortality, ill health, environmental hazards, and so on…” (203). One wonders what the “so on” covers. I’m
willing to bet, though, that if we drew a portrait of this universal body of the worker,
he might look a lot like me: a white male with the “normal” bodily capacities
ascribed to human beings. But the universality of the body is fractured by material
particularisms—by race, by gender, by disability—that cannot be subsumed into a
formal, superordinate set of real needs. To take the racialization or gendering
of bodies seriously is not simply to respect difference, in some multiculti
way; rather, it is to grasp the fact that differential bodily materializations
yield new and particular needs that produce new modes of thinking and accessing
universality. What I hear in Chibber’s work is the old refrain used to silence
feminists, queers, and race radicals: After the revolution, we’ll fix that
right up. Undeterred, feminists, queers, and race radicals began their own
revolutions, they thought freedom from the way in which their particularized
bodies were articulated to social structure, and did far more radical work (in
the States, at least) than 2938 Stalinist sects. The radical Marxists—the real
materialists—took note. (There was, of course, significant overlap between
these populations.)

Political rationalities and
their idioms shift according to the modes by which a social formation is
articulated to capital. These idioms are not accidental, contingent, or
reducible to mere content; rather, they materially express an insurgent
relation to capital, even when they do not jive with the grammar of rational
interest that primes some anti-capitalist politics. To not pay attention to the
specificity of these idioms—to reduce them to a universalism or to transcode
them into Enlightenment talk—is to court disaster.

I’m not going to go into his
criticisms of Chakrabarty; I’ve already been going on for too long. They follow
the same line. Chibber wants to save Marxism from postcolonialism’s assault; he
ends up transforming Marxism into an abstract, formalist, anti-materialist hot
mess of Enlightenment jibber-jabber.

Why? Why? Why?

If you’re like me, you’re
wondering: Why was this even written? After all, Chibber’s story is a twice (or
thrice) told tale. When have “Marxists” not assailed postcolonial studies for
not being Marxist enough? Moreover, his dramatic intervention is a bit belated.
He invests postcolonial theory with an institutional clout it has not possessed
for some years. Within the U.S. intellectual scene, myriad conferences, special
issues of journals, and books have declared the demise of postcolonial studies;
in literature departments across the nation, hiring lines that once would have
been “postcolonial” positions have increasingly become “Anglophone” or “Global
English” jobs. (Perhaps things are different in Chibber’s field of sociology,
but I doubt it.) I myself don’t identify as a postcolonialist—not just because,
period-wise, I’m more properly described as a colonialist, but because I
identify primarily as a Caribbeanist. (This might have something to do with the
old, old tendency to put South Asian theory and history at the center of
postcolonial theory, as Chibber does.) So, what’s at stake?

In part, I think that
“Marxism versus postcolonial theory” is simply running interference for a set
of disciplinary battles over methodological and theoretical orientation. The
antinomy that Chibber continually establishes is one between a realist
sociology (with an investment in abstract structures that prime and cause human
action) and hermeneutically inclined fields of anthropology, history, and literary
studies. (Don’t mention literary studies to Chibber. He doesn’t seem to like it
very much.) In each of Chibber’s chapters, the explanatory triumph of
universalist accounts over particularist accounts can be read as the triumph of
a certain form of sociological reason over its others.

More importantly, I think
that Chibber is desperate for the resurgence of a particular kind of Marxism,
one that was displaced not by
postcolonial theorists but by anticolonial Marxists like Fanon, James, and so
on. That’s why he can’t incorporate them into his account of postcolonial
theory: they are Marxists who mount critiques of formalist universalisms by
keeping close to the particular, by maintaining the tension that obtains
between economic structure and lived phenomenology, between structuralist
accounts of the world and hermeneutic investigations into worlds. I have no
idea why one would wish to return to the days of CP sloganeering. (I can’t be
the only one who heard echoes of “black and white, unite and fight!” in his
book.) But the desire is there, and it shapes the way he constructs
postcolonial theory. Chibber’s fantasy that an anti-Marxist postcolonial theory
reigns hegemonic in the academy enables him to maintain the fantasy that the
once and future king of Marxism might some day be restored to rule. But, in
order to elaborate this fantasy, he needs to transform a tension internal to
postcolonial theory (between Marxist accounts of structure and hermeneutic
approaches to the particular—which can still be, of course, Marxist) into a
struggle exterior to it.

But if Marxism regains a
position of prominence in the US academy—and I hope it does—it no doubt not be Chibber’s brand of Marxism.
Chibber rightly locates the conditions of possibility for a Marxist resurgence
in the academy in social movements beyond its walls. As he notes in his
interview, “until we get the kind of movements that buoyed Marxism in the early
years after World War I, or in the late 1960s and early 1970s, you won’t see a
change.” He ignores the fact, however, that a vibrant U.S. social movement did just take place in the form of
Occupy—a diffuse movement that drew on the idioms of anarchism, liberalism, and
certain forms of Marxism. Yet, because this movement did not limit itself to
“the kinds of things that Marxists used to talk about” in the good old days,
Chibber doesn’t mention it: it is not functional for buoying a rigorously
restrictive Marxism. In good vanguardist fashion, he notes the effectivity of
such social movements only to dismiss them: the social movements adopt an idiom
of anti-oppression that he claims is incompatible with a consideration of class
exploitation.It takes a Marxist of a
special kind to discount the radical potentials immanent to “a movement from
the bottom,” a special kind of Marxist who wants to pulverize the textured
phenomenology of social life into the universality of class. Indeed, Chibber’s
Marxism will never regain its position of hegemony because Marxism has already
beyond the narrow horizon by which he bounds it. The Marxism fashionable both
inside and outside the academy today is that Marxism which has learned to meet
people where they are, that has learned that a caring approach to particularity
and a concern to foster difference is not opposed to the universal but is,
rather, one way of producing new universals, of realizing freer modes of being
in common. Indeed, the Marxism fashionable today is that Marxism which has
taken postcolonial theory as a serious incitement, as a spur to think critically
about its own deficits but also as a challenge to uncover its hidden
possibilities. It is a Marxism that has foregone the fantasy-laden drama of
polemic in favor of the open rhythm of critique and auto-critique. As Gayatri
Spivak once
wrote, “Marx keeps moving for a Marxist as the world moves” (67). Through
the work of writers such as Spivak, postcolonial theory has moved with Marx, and Marxism too has kept up.

It’s only the Marxists who
have fallen behind.

[EDIT: My response to Paul Heideman's criticisms of me. I'm keeping it here so as to limit the amount of posts and to refrain from the drama of response / counter-response etc. Fight capitalism not each other and all that.]

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Hi Paul, thank you for
taking the time to respond to my post, especially because, as you say, it
deserves none of the attention it has received. I was raised Catholic, so being
informed that I’m not deserving of anyone’s regard is nothing too new—it only amplifies
my gratitude to my readers and to you. I admire the passion behind your words,
Paul, but I fear you’ve fundamentally misread me. I also fear that you fail to
respond to my primary question: If Chibber offers a Marxist criticism of
subaltern studies, what kind of Marxism provides Chibber the epistemological
and political foundation of his attack? My aim, then, was not to defend the
subalternists from Chibber. Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Charkrabarty, and all the
rest are more than competent to do that themselves. My aim was to defend
Marxism from being, once more, defined as a universalist theory that reduces
particularity to an accident, a contingency, or something to strip away so that
the pure body of universality might appear. My silence on aspects of Chibber’s
arguments against the subalternists in no way amounts to a concession, any more
than your silence on many substantive aspects of my reply amounts to one. So,
point by point:

I turned to Marx’s analytic
of formal and real subsumption in order to demonstrate that, for Marx, capital
constitutively zones its universality. Particularity does not simply befall it
as an accident or as something it picks up, makes due with, or reproduces as an
effect of its universalizing drive. This, to you, might sound like Chibber’s
argument that labor is not “homogenous”—a claim that I marked in the text as
correct. I was interested, however, in pegging the heterogeneity of labor to
the striated way in which capital itself globalizes. The blocking of capital’s
globalization is a moment immanent to capital itself: capital blocks itself and
blocks itself off, zones itself into regions of the world-system. It was not a
question for me, then, of showing that “abstract labor” is always concreted and
concretely differentiated, a specific and particular body riven by forms of
difference, as Chibber argues and as I agree. Making that claim is already to
look at labor from the vantage of real subsumption. My aim was to show that
Marx creates space to think about particularity from the horizon of an
abstraction that has not happened, or that only happens in an epistemic
elsewhere. I was arguing that it is simply misleading to say that capital
“universalizes” when the apparent unity of the unit is a territorialized
perception and a territorially differentiated structure. For me, capitalism is
globalization without universalization.

I’ll engage your third point
next and quickly. You, quite simply, chastise me for laying out the
architecture of a theoretical framework and than extrapolating consequences
from that theoretical position. I was not imagining what Chibber might write, I
wasn’t trying to get into his head. I wouldn’t presume, and I’m sure there are
lovely thoughts in there. I was simply extending the consequences of a
theoretical position, demonstrating what this position makes thinkable and
unthinkable, seeing what is possible to think from the perspective of this
position. That’s what critical thinking is: unpacking assumptions an argument
makes and determining their theoretical effects.

Besides—and to address your
second point—it’s somewhat contradictory for you to excoriate me for seeing
something in a text that isn’t explicitly there while simultaneously
congratulating Chibber for his indifference to Marx’s own theoretical text in favor
of some amorphous but “certain version of the Marxist tradition,” a tradition
that forms the epistemic foundation for his argument. We’ll talk about that in
a second. But, Paul, you criticize me for saying Chibber criticizes the
subalternists for not being Marxist enough, only to suggest that he in fact
criticizes them for “reject[ing] this legacy” of Marxist thought. In short, I
said he criticizes them for not being Marxist enough; you say he criticizes
them for not being Marxist at all. Fair enough. All of which returns me to my
main point: What Marxism primes Chibber’s criticism? It’s not, by your own
admission and Chibber’s, one derived from Marx. It’s some vague but “certain”
“tradition.” Like I said, I was raised Catholic, and I think that escaping the
magisterium of the church has turned me into a kind of sola scriptura guy—I
can’t take the authoritative claims to the authority of a tradition as meaning
anything. So, please, just name the tradition.

As I argued, I don’t think
you can. Chibber’s “Marxist” tradition is standing in for two other traditions:
the Enlightenment (but which one?) and a certain kind of Weberian sociology.
All of that is fine, I guess. Just stop trying to seize the sign of Marxism to
pass off theoretical positions that are decidedly not Marxist. Stop using the
sign of Marxism to castigate a field of knowledge that, while decidedly possessing
its own problems, can in fact enrich and thicken Marxism and Marxist,
anti-capitalist politics.

Saturday, April 20, 2013

I am constitutionally
incapable of comprehending mass and massed hatred for one person. Still less am
I capable of affectively binding to the state because it conducts these ugly
affects and gives them a form of realization. This holds true no matter how terrible
the object of hatred is. I’m not claiming this as a good quality; perhaps some
things deserve hatred without reserve. I think this incapacity derives, in some
bizarre way, from my Catholic upbringing. I don’t think of having been raised
Catholic as being formative at all, really. But I do retain a distinct
impression, from when I was eight or so, of listening to Genesis being read
once during a service. Chapter 18. God wants to destroy a queer city or two;
Abraham talks God down. Suppose there are fifty righteous men in the city, Abraham
asks, will you still destroy it? No, God says, I won’t. Abraham keeps going,
talking God all the way down to ten. The story cuts off: it’s unclear if ten is
the threshold beyond which God will destroy the city, if ten is acceptable
collateral damage, or if we—as
readers and as ethical subjects—are supposed to keep up the line of thought and
continue winnowing down the number.
But down to what? I think one
is the number one is supposed to want to think. You know, like the “let a
thousand guilty men go free rather than one innocent be punished” concept of
liberal jurisprudence. But my childish ears or brain didn’t work too well: I
always wanted the number to be zero, as if God would spare the city not for the
sake of the one innocent man but for all of the guilty. I wanted the point of
the story to be that all punishment is awful, terrible, even when inflicted upon
the guilty, whoever they are, and that it is impossible to love those who think
punishment could be righteous. What if we’re not supposed to read this story as
an attempt to hammer out a mathesis of justice, I wonder, but rather as an
incitement to detach oneself from transcendent structures of justice,
structures that equate doing justice with doling retribution? I want to rewrite
the old dictum: it’s better for a thousand guilty people to go free than to
maintain a positive relation to the act of punishment.

I’m thinking of this now as
I look at my Twitter feed, as I look at the stuff going up under the #Boston
hashtag. It’s pretty conventional stuff, really: some Islamophobes here, some
nationalists chanting “U.S.A.!” over there (there’s overlap in that population),
and plenty of law-and-order liberals just hoping that justice is dealt and
done. Desires for violent retribution are insistently expressed. If you’re a radical leftist, it’s pretty depressing to read. If you’re a
kind of hybrid of autonomist Marxism and anarchism—that is, if you believe that
every person is equipped with what it takes to live in a self-governing,
democratic, and just fashion—it’s enough to cause despair. How can you love
people who love punishment, who seem to relish in the possibility of a body
coming apart? How can you love people who attach to the violent arm of law, who
cheer on cops as Abraham might have—but I refuse to believe he would have—cheered
on God when he eventually set about destroying those evil, guilty cities? Which
is to say: how can I love these people? And I want to. Not just because I’m a
fringe leftist, but because, like so many others since the bombs went off, I’ve
tried getting in touch with the fear and the pain, with the loss, with the
catastrophe. Like so many others, I texted friends in Boston, hoping they were
okay—not just physically, but mentally. I’ve spent hours over the past few days
doing nothing but reading Twitter, listening to the Boston PD scanner, and
hoping that no one else would get hurt. But now I’m wondering how sympathetic
acts of outreach convert so readily into fantasies of violent justice.

I have one hope to hang my
hat on: I’m not certain that these announcements of attachment to the nation,
to the police, to the strong arm of the law in fact express a positive binding
to transcendent structures of authority.

I’ll reason this out in
terms of Twitter's patterning of the catastrophe. Twitter is a strange form of encountering an event. It
presents the event as an ongoing scenario; indeed, Twitter gives access to the
event in the form of its unraveling. The temporality of the situation dilates:
you’re with it for every beat, through every false detail, through every new
revelation. One comes to inhabit the event as a kind of environment, one
constituted by anxiety, by uncertainty, by possibility. This kind of
being-in-contact with the ongoingness of an event is rare; we tend to encounter
ongoing temporalities in and through the duration of the ordinary, the boring
business of everyday life. And so I think that we have an extraordinarily
limited repertoire of modes by which we can maintain and express a positive
relation (care, fidelity, attachment) to being in the midst of its unfolding. I
encountered this first with LiveStreams and Twitter feeds reporting on direct
actions during the Occupy era: the only way to mark your geographically distant
but existentially proximate being-with the political act was to offer a simple,
“Solidarity #OWS!” Small tokens. They seem meaningless, but they aren’t—or,
rather, the substantive relations such locutions mean to produce just haven’t
yet found, and perhaps will never be able to find, a better or more adequate
genre. I saw the same thing as the event marked “#BostonMarathon”
catastrophically erupted: “I’m praying for you #Boston” and such like. No doubt some prayers and well-wishers
imagine that praying and wishing will have some kind of material efficacy. But
I don’t think that the point of these speech-acts is to alter the ongoing event
so much as to access it, to get in touch with it, to inhabit the space of its
unfolding. And the desire to dwell within this uncertain space, to receive
what-comes in order to stay-with, is an act of love.

We stayed with it, the event
unfolded, the cops closed in. Then the discourse shifted. It became
Islamophobic, it became nationalistic, it became saturated with retributive and
punitive desires. A large part of the Twitterverse was divided on a simple
question: should the cops shoot the kid dead in the boat or keep him alive so
as to torturously delay the time of his inevitable death. Care seemed to
transform into callousness, all in the name of doing justice. And I just wanted
Abraham—my childhood Abraham—to appear, to try getting everyone to detach from
violence, from fantasies of force routed through the idiom of legal process.

So here’s my hope, my own
prayer to and for Boston. Events constitute thick affective environments—saturated
with care, with concern, with love—that we don’t want to let go of but don’t
know how to stick close to. The devolution to these aggressive languages is an
effect of a desire to stay with and in proximity to the event in the absence of
a robust grammar for maintaining fidelity to it—especially as the event comes
to a close, as the care we shared and experienced is poised to be swallowed,
once more, into the humdrum durative time of ordinary life. People tweeted out “U.S.A.!
U.S.A.!” not necessarily because they’re silly nationalists without a thought
in their brains but because the nation provides a to-hand idiom for containing
and preserving the truth of the event. It’s a sad admission, really: the nation
will endure and live on in a way that the care and concern staged throughout
the event will not. So too the fantasmatic staging of violent justice: the
temporality of the legal process ensures not that the case will be brought to
closure but, rather, that the event will remain ongoing and open, even if
diminished in intensity. Love and care need to encrypt themselves in the
to-hand idioms of the nation and violent justice because, well, we suck at
loving and caring, because our everyday worlds bound the spacing of our
attachments. Catastrophic events show us how to love (there’s nothing else to
do with and within an event). We don’t know how to articulate this love but we
know we don’t want to leave its scene. And so love survives the closure of the
event by clothing itself in the form of its opposite; we go from donating blood
to drawing it, at least imaginatively.

The idioms of violence are
standing in for the intensities of our love. To access this love, to set it
loose in the aftermath of this event, we need to unbind our thoughts and
feelings from legal processes of punishment. The necessity of doing so is pressing.
In the wake of the bombings, U.S. Muslims have already been harassed (once
again) as proto-terrorists—that is, as subjects proleptically available for
just retribution. The public obsession with punishing the guilty means that
some innocents will be harmed, as Ibrahim made clear. But he meant more than
that, I think, when he quietly but surely set more rigorous limits to just
punishment. The accumulative force of his questions conveys a meaning
irreducible to the questions of math, of numbers, of collateral damage, questions
that might be summarized as, “At what point, God, would you be comfortable
doing this?” If you follow my eight-year-old self in embracing the great
unasked question of Genesis—“If there are zero righteous men in the city, God,
will you spare it?”—Abraham is really asking God if he wishes to punish at all,
if he wants to maintain an attachment to violence, even if in the name of
justice. (The God of Genesis, of course, needed insistent reminders to stop
killing everyone.) Abraham is, I hope, encouraging us to think justice beyond
punishment, to free justice from the violent idioms that always seem to capture
it. Is loving justice worth it when our investment in its violence perverts our
capacities to love? When the violence of justice comes to stand in for the
positivity of love itself?

I’m not saying that Dzhokar
Tsarnaev should not be brought to justice, whatever that means; that is inevitable. My point,
rather, is that loving justice cannot possibly be worth it when our investment
in its violent realization transforms love for others into hate for one, when the violence
of justice becomes love’s idiom. I don’t know what will happen to Tsarnaev, but
I do know that we—you and me—will have to live through a world in which this
event happened, in which we strive to assemble its meanings, and in which we
constitute ourselves through the meanings we assign it. Do we wish the truth of
this event to consist in the fact of violent justice having been done, or in
the modes of care that obtained in and through this catastrophe? Do we wish to
imagine ourselves as donors of blood or drawers? (And here, I think, it is an
either/or.)

It’s better for a thousand
guilty people to go free than for us to relish in one act of punishment.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

A fully neoliberalized world
would radiate disaster triumphant, but a fully neoliberalized world is
impossible. Your staunchest neoliberal—say, Margaret Thatcher—does not want the
entirety of the social to fall under a biopolitical calculus, to become priced
or monetized. Rather, the neoliberal order requires the proliferation and
production of common socialities capable of maintaining life in a world
instituted to be indifferent to life’s maintenance. After having pulverized
society in that famous quote, for example, Thatcher tells us that the family
remains as the site upon which “individual men and women” should “cast…their
problems.” Without positive externalities like the family, the neoliberalized world
would simply collapse (as Polanyi argued of classical liberalism years ago) and
many lives with it. The neoliberal state relies upon common socialities—everyday
ways of organizing our worlds—to surrogate for the services (which we think)
the state used to provide. We who
resist neoliberal capitalism want to think of these common socialities as
maintaining a certain relation of exteriority to the neoliberal order, and,
indeed, as offering a grounds of resistance to it. The commons is, after all,
the new rallying cry of a left that doesn’t want to say communist. And, sure,
some of these modalities of being-in-common do bear traces of utopian
possibilities. But many don’t. The neoliberal order grounds itself in such
to-hand modes of social organization and sets them to work to absorb the shock
of the state’s abdication of responsibility for performing basic social upkeep.

All of this is to say that
we, in our everyday lives, engender the conditions of possibility for the
continuance of the neoliberal normal. We saw this, ironically and horribly, in
a too-common response to Thatcher’s death. “Cunt,” “bitch,” “ding dong the
witch is dead”—it was a veritable festival of misogynistic name-slinging.
Believe me, I have no sympathy for the devil, and I think Thatcher lived about
40 years too long. But exorcising Thatcher with a misogynistic curse is the
best way of ensuring that she will continue to haunt us.

This is because neoliberalism
thrives on structural misogyny. Gender is one powerful mechanism by which the
neoliberal order converts our potentially resistant common worlds into positive
externalities, into social formations functional for the maintenance of life in
an unlivable world. After all, the state’s abdication of its responsibility for
social care does not mean that care disappears. (Well, for some it does.) The
burden of care, rather, is displaced (in part) to the family, as Thatcher made
clear, which means that this burden is displaced disproportionately (if not
entirely) onto women caught up within patriarchal family structures. For poor
women of color in particular, neoliberal structural adjustments create
conditions in which the routinized hyper-exploitation of unsalaried care labor
intensifies. To take an example geographically proximate to me, consider Rahm
Emmanuel’s impending shutdown of over 50 Chicago public schools. Kids slated to
travel to out-of-neighborhood schools will have to get up earlier. Maybe they’ll
have to be dropped off or picked up. Maybe they’ll have to travel through
inhospitable neighborhoods or feel sad and isolated in their new worlds. Maybe
they won’t learn as well and so require extra hours of tutoring. Maybe
available social services (one or two meals a day, say, or after-school care)
will be cut. Negotiating these transformations will require new investments of
time, affective energy, attention, and (if it is available, and even if it is
not) money. Someone is going to
surrogate for the dismantled structure of care. It’s not hard to guess at the
demographic profile of this someone.

There is, of course, no
transcendental historical principle mandating that women’s care labor should
surrogate for the state’s instituted carelessness. The neoliberal order simply
uses—and, true, reproduces through legislative and fiscal programs—the
structural misogyny of the North Atlantic patriarchal family. It found this
patriarchal structure to-hand, and it continues to find it to-hand. It found
this structure reproduced every time an anti-austerity radical called Thatcher
a “cunt.” Meanwhile, Fox News was going gaga over Thatcher as an exemplar of a
good kind of feminism. We might have taken the moment to demonstrate how
Thatcherite policies disproportionately and negatively impact women. Instead,
manarchists called her a “witch.” (Which doesn’t even make sense, people. The
figuration of the witch still cited by our social imaginary emerges
from the symbolics developed by capitalist dudes enclosing commons who had
to deal with various forms of feminine subjectivity that haunted the outskirts
of the proper. Thatcher began life as a commoner, sure, but I don’t think she
was that kind of commoner. Only
structural misogyny, sedimented in our very language, can account for the
bizarre inversion whereby the Dissolver of the Commons can don the symbolic
garb accorded to the victims of such dissolution.)

Getting beyond neoliberal
capitalism requires the production of social forms of care that are defective
for capitalism—not reinscribing a
hierarchical social fabric that, by diminishing the value of women as women, allows them to be positioned as
the proper subjects to take up non-valued, non-monetized, unremunerated, but
utterly necessary care labor. Contesting neoliberalism is great and totally
important, but it’s not some Great Abstract Thing that exists in a relation of
pure exteriority to us. Neoliberalism works because it gloms onto existent
socialities and transforms them into positive externalities. We make it work. Acting
as if the world will be aces once Keynes makes a triumphant return is to ignore
the sad fact that we inhabit and reproduce common worlds utterly functional for
neoliberal accumulation tactics. The violence that inheres in these common
worlds is irreducible to the neoliberal order; structural misogyny preceded this
order and, at the rate we’re going, will survive it, too.